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UK census records & electoral rolls

UK census records reveal complete family groups — together with occupations, addresses and more — every ten years from the latest 1911 Census back to 1841. Then fill in the gaps with electoral rolls and poll books.

Latest census & electoral releases

The West Yorkshire Electoral Rolls contain yearly registers of people in West Yorkshire who could vote in elections from 1840 to 1962. These records help you place your ancestors in a particular area, and can also reveal a bit about their property.

There were property restrictions on voting until 1918, when all men over the age of 21 and some women over 30 were granted the vote. Women only became eligible to vote at age 21 in 1928.

This collection lists the details of voters in Surrey between 1918 and 1945. The records may help you pinpoint your ancestors in this area. If they owned property, you might also find details of this in some of the older records.

You can search for your ancestors by name, area or even street address.

These electoral records reveal the people who could vote in North Nottinghamshire in 1885. This date is important because anyone who wasn’t a property owner or who lived in a rural area had only just been given the right to vote – so plenty of ‘new’ names appear here.

The records could help you confirm Notts names, dates and places. You can then go on and discover more in the 1881 and 1891 censuses.

Recommended census & electoral records

Track the changes in your family through the Victorian era, all the way back to the first useful census in 1841. These are the most important records on our site, whether you’re just getting started or filling in gaps in your tree.

We have complete national censuses of England and Wales, 1841-1911, revealing occupations, birth details, other family members and much more. We also have searchable indexes of Scottish census records up to 1901.

These two collections provide a rare glimpse into early Irish censuses. 1841/1851 Census Abstracts (Northern Ireland) includes around 23,000 names that appeared in the 1841 and 1851 records. 1841/1851 Census Abstracts (Republic of Ireland) is a smaller collection for the South.

Most Irish census records were destroyed in a fire in 1922. These abstracts were created by combining remaining fragments with other documents of the time, such as pension records.

One of the great things about democracy is the number of records it creates. Our electoral registers take you back through both World Wars and the suffragette movement, to a time when only wealthy men could vote.

These records reveal over 150 million names and addresses all over the old counties of London and Middlesex. Because they were taken every 12 months, they let you pinpoint your ancestors’ movements in-between the census years, and well into the 20th century.